So last month I took a chance and became obsessed with an excellent game called Echo. It was so outside my wheelhouse, being horror, queer, a visual novel, and furry, that a month later, nothing has truly captured my interest. Echo was so foreign, weird, and interesting that typical gaming experiences seemed so predictable by comparison. While I was writing my review for that game, I learned the author took a two year break in the middle of Echo’s development to complete an entire unrelated visual novel, for their mental health. And few things spark my curiosity like art made as an escape from one’s own creations.

Setting the mood: Imagine if David Lynch took a break from making Twin Peaks to direct a hentai before returning for another season as if nothing happened.

I initially felt compelled to compare Adastra to Echo because Echo felt so profound in ways that were easily accessible and relatable to me. But that does not help explain what Adastra is. Adastra is wild, ridiculous, and indulgent in all the ways my biases aligned upon first hearing the words “gay furry visual novel.” I had fun with it! But I am keenly aware this game was not made for me, and it is rare for that feeling to be so strong I become unsure in articulating my thoughts about it. Because there is nothing worse than outsiders coming into a niche space to proudly offer their ignorance as insight.

Especially since my enjoyment of this game is very much in spite of its goals. There’s politics, there’s sci-fi soap operatics, but the primary goal is romancing a himbo alien wolf man. A large part of Adastra is indulging in the fantasy of having a buff, rich, big-dicked boyfriend who loves you, provides your every material need, is always horny for you, never asks you to change, would kill to defend you, and also - happens to be a 7 foot wolf man. As a result, the build-up, justification, and logistics of the relationship are abridged, because existing in that indulgent fantasy space is the appeal.

I’ll be honest - I did not like space wolf boyfriend! He is an idiot!

What kept my interest in Adastra enough to finish it was the commitment to worldbuilding that arose from placing indulgences first. You can almost work backwards in seeing how the plot, setting, and character relationships were reverse-engineered to service different indulgences. The setting is in outer space, with aliens whose cultures were the inspiration for the Roman Empire and Ancient Egypt. Why? So that every character could be shirtless and pantless 100% of the time. Swimming and visiting the communal bath are both common activities in the plot. The player character, a human man from Earth, is kidnapped by a wolf man to be his pet, which basically means grooming, massaging, and sexually pleasing him. Adastra is a textbook case of how anything “being justified by plot relevance” can just as easily be reinterpreted as “plot relevance being used to justify inclusion.”

By committing to sex slaves as a concept, Adastra is a world with whole planets of indentured servants. By committing to the idea that all these buff furry aliens are both politicians and fucking, sex and sexuality becomes central to the machinisms of the plot. I initially found it odd that, in a game going out of its way to include Annubis dolled up in glittery gold eye liner, homophobia and sexism are ingrained in galactic culture. Until I realized that by making homosexuality stigamatized, the mere existence of gayness could become the plot in a way not possible if the alien societies were more liberal. Adastra then surprised me by giving sexy Annubis enough depth to become the most nuanced and sympathetic character in the game. Even after I saw him getting absolutely railed to climax.

I’ll be honest, I laughed while playing this game more than once. At first, I feared I was being a Mika. But having finished it, I’m convinced Adastra was inviting me to laugh with it at its own absurdity. The character designs are so goofy and exaggerated. Every furry calls the human character’s love for rhythm in music quaintly “simian”. At one point, the player character dresses up as a tiger for a play, later horrified to realize this is the in-universe equivalent of blackface and the wolves are very cat racist. Above all, between the needlessly complicated politicking and the mostly mundane nothingness of most of its plot, Adastra is fun. And that is a tone very hard to write.

In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game, and Adastra, while too niche to recommend to anyone I know, (even me!), is too much dumb schlocky fun to be considered average - especially for a game released for free(!). 3 stars at B rank feels appropriate, even if it comes with a lot of caveats. Namely, this is furry, it is very gay, you will see canine dong. My curiosity for Adastra came entirely from my experience with the author’s other work. If this level of indulgence was required in order to keep Echo the focused mastercraft that it is, I’m very happy the author got the opportunity to refresh themself here.

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As Adastra’s explicit art very much did not awaken anything inside me, I feel my curiosity with the furry visual novel genre is currently sated. Adastra currently has twice the number of ratings on itch.io as Echo, which, while being both understandable (Echo is dark) and a travesty, means I have absolutely no idea how I would reliably investigate the genre. I fear I might have repeated my experience with JRPGs by starting with Chrono Trigger, and the genre was mostly down hill from there.

It's great to see this visual novel mostly finished, as I had previously played when it still didn't have its true ending. I love the characters that Haps drew for this game, their personalities certainly shining through visually to heighten the in-game text. The special in-game art that would appear in certain scenes were a treat as well, especially the newly added ones for my second playthrough. While it's easy to expect stock images and music for visual novels like these, they served the story and setting enough to not be distracting. Though I can understand if the story doesn't appeal to everyone, I had a great time through my visit in Adastra and its grand space opera.

Adastra feels like exactly what it is; a much more lighthearted side project written to take a break from writing the literary behemoth that is Echo. Sure, lighthearted for EchoProject still includes a handful of emotionally distressing scenes, but they're in a much lesser number, intensity, and frequency when compared to something like Echo. In fact, I feel like this story is missing or weaker in a lot of the aspects I find particularly intriguing about Echo, but that kind of feels like that's the point?

Adastra strikes me as something that's more accessible to a furry audience than Echo, but way, way less accessible to a general audience. Dating the buff, half-naked (and sometimes fully naked) wolf man is kind of 'The Point' in Adastra--the Itch pages say as much; Adastra is described first and foremost a romance VN, and Echo a horror VN. This is a narrative goal, of course, that is going to appeal wayyy more to furries, and so if you liked Echo in spite of its presentation, I probably wouldn't recommend this one to you for the handful of scenes that remind me most of that game.

But does the game deliver on this goal? Generally, yeah, but I still can't help but feel disappointed in how predictable the arc of everything is, an aspect I don't think I'd ever ascribe to Echo. Sure, there's romance drama and royal drama but it's not very difficult to see the vague direction of where the story is headed, even if the path towards it is blurry at times. The political story almost feels a bit Shakesperean, and I don't really mean that as a compliment; it feels very telegraphed and theatrical, if that makes any sense. The heavy usage of Greco-Roman aesthetics and focus on royal power dynamics certainly doesn't help with that.

I wish the sci-fi elements were a bit more present. The world building is cool, and there's a decent amount of bits we get of it, but the story doesn't really start indulging in it until well past the half way mark. Aside from that most of it just feels like an explanation for the Isekai to happen, and such a vast majority of the story happens exclusively in the palace that it's pretty easy to forget that you got to this planet in a space ship that could shorten time and space in front of itself, even with the presence of Com. Just feels like a missed opportunity imo.

There are honestly a lot of missed opportunities in Adastra. I wish the MC wasn't so blank-slate. I wish we saw more than a couple of sapient races, since the game brings up the fact that there's probably, like, hundreds of them. The sex scenes feel, gratuitous, I guess? Like you could replace most (not all, but most) of them with a fade to black and not really miss anything. But I have to remind myself what the 'goal' of this VN is in the first place and that a lot of people are going to be coming to this specifically for those scenes. No wonder it's got twice as many ratings on itch compared to Echo.

I personally liked Adastra despite my issues with it, but I'm in, or at least, pretty close to, the target demographic here. I can't really see anyone too far from it getting anything out of this like I could see with Echo.

Ultimately, Adastra almost feels a bit too polished, and in that, becomes a little too reserved, like it's got all of its harsh edges sanded off. Echo is radical and experimental, it feels like a truly forward thinking piece of media. Despite having much more graphic sexuality than Echo ever does (and outnumbering its sex scenes in a third of the time), Adastra feels like it plays it a little too safe, at least as far as you can for a gay furry VN. There are hints, glimpses of something outstanding here, and there are a few scenes that I'd say cross into that, but largely Adastra is "pretty good escapism (only applicable for a small demographic) but not super notable." Not a bad place to end up for a video game, but seeing what Echo was just makes me wish this was so much more.